had protested the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.
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Even before the American boycott, however, the Soviet Union had already seen the political implications of hosting the Olympics. For example, one of the members of the USSR Olympic Organizing Committee was G. P. Goncharov, the head of the Communist Party propaganda machine. Moreover, in the fall of 1979 the government arrested dissidents and warned other people who complained even mildly about conditions. In Moscow there was a campaign to remove drunks, the unemployed, and even teenagers and children from the city during the Olympics.
Soviet sports actually survived the Soviet Union in a sense, as in the 1992 Olympics athletes from the former Soviet Union competed together on what was known as the Unified Team. Although afterward the separate independent nations fielded separate teams, the memory persisted into 1996, as some Russian newspapers could not resist a brief mention that, added together, the former Soviet republics combined for the highest number of medals of any country. Economic problems would persist for the former Soviet sports programs, sometimes interfering with athletes’ training, but so would national pride and excellence, as the Russian Federation, for example, won 88 medals, second only to the United States with its larger population, in the 2000 Summer Olympics. See also: MOSCOW OLYMPICS OF 1980
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Booker, Christopher. (1981). The Games War: A Moscow Journal. London: Faber and Faber. Edelman, Robert. (1993). Serious Fun: A History of Spectator Sports in the USSR. New York: Oxford University Press. Morton, Henry W. (1963). Soviet Sport: Mirror of Soviet Society. New York: Collier Books. Peppard, Victor, and Riordan, James. (1993). Playing Politics: Soviet Sport Diplomacy to 1992. Greenwich, CT: JAI Press. Riordan, James. (1977). Sport in Soviet Society: Development of Sport and Physical Education in Russia and the USSR. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Shneidman, N. Norman. (1978). The Soviet Road to Olympus: Theory and Practice of Soviet Physical Culture and Sport. Toronto: The Ontario Institute for Studies in Education.
On October 4, 1957, Soviet space scientists launched the first manmade Sputnik, or satellite, to orbit the earth. Sputnik had great significance on several counts. It indicated that the USSR was a world leader in science and engineering. It was a great propaganda achievement, enabling the nation’s leaders to claim both scientific preeminence and the superiority of the Soviet social system. Sputnik also triggered the space race, as the United States and the USSR committed to an expansive effort to be the first in a series of other space firsts. The USSR followed Sputnik with several other achievements: the first man in space (Yuri Gargarin); the first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova); the first two-person and three-person orbital flights; the first space walk; and so on. Sputnik also revealed that the USSR was or would soon be capable of launching intercontinental ballistic missiles.
Sputnik was important to the Soviet people as well. It demonstrated to them that after years of sacrifice under Stalin the nation was truly on the road to communism based on the achievements of science. Tens of thousands of citizens gathered in the evenings to track Sputnik through the sky, using binoculars or amateur radios to pick up its signal. School children sang odes to Sputnik; poets wrote poems to Sputnik.
Sputnik was only the first Soviet satellite: More than 2,700 others followed into space. While their primary purposes were military, they also served such ends as communication, meteorology, and global prospecting. See also: GAGARIN, YURI ALEXEYEVICH; SPACE PROGRAM; UNITED STATES, RELATIONS WITH
BIBLIOGRAPHY
McDougall, Walter A. (1985). The Heavens and the Earth. New York: Basic Books.
On August 31, 1935, Aleksei Stakhanov, a thirty-year-old miner in the Donets Basin, hewed 102 tons of coal during his six-hour shift. This amount represented fourteen times his quota, and within a few
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days his feat was hailed by Pravda as a world record. Anxious to celebrate and reward individuals’ achievements in production that could serve as stimuli to other workers, the party launched the Stakhanovite movement. The title of Stakhanovite, conferred on workers and peasants who set production records or otherwise demonstrated mastery of their assigned tasks, quickly superseded that of shockworker. Day by day throughout the autumn of 1935, the campaign intensified, culminating in an All-Union Conference of Stakhanovites in industry and transportation that met in the Kremlin in November. At the conference, outstanding Stakhanovites mounted the podium to recount how, defying their quotas and often the skepticism of their workmates and bosses, they applied new techniques of production to achieve stupendous results for which they were rewarded with wages that reached dizzying heights. Josef Stalin captured the upbeat mood of the conference when, by way of explaining how such records were only possible in the land of socialism, he uttered the phrase, “Life has become better, and happier too.” Widely disseminated, and even set to song, Stalin’s words served as the motto of the movement.
The Stakhanovite movement thus encompassed lessons not only about how to work, but also about how to live. In addition to providing a model for success on the shop floor, it conjured up images of the good life. Many of the same qualities Stakhanovites were supposed to exhibit in the one sphere-cleanliness, neatness, preparedness, and a keenness for learning-were applicable to the other. These qualities were associated with kultur-nost (culturedness), the acquisition of which marked the individual as a New Soviet Man or Woman. Advertisements for perfume, articles about Stakhanovites on shopping sprees, photographs of Stakhanovites sharing their happiness with their families, newsreels showing them driving new automobiles-presented to them as gifts-and moving into comfortable apartments all symbolized kul-turnost. Wives of male Stakhanovites had an important part to play in the movement as helpmates preparing nutritious meals, keeping their apartments clean and comfortable, and otherwise creating a cultured environment in the home so that their husbands were well-rested and eager to work with great energy. It was also important to demonstrate that Stakhanovites were admired by their comrades and considered worthy of holding public office.
Notwithstanding the enormous publicity surrounding Stakhanovites and their achievements,
ENCYCLOPEDIA OF RUSSIAN HISTORY
they were not necessarily popular. Even before the raising of output norms in early 1936, workers who had not been favored with the best conditions, and consequently struggled to fulfill their norms, expressed resentment of Stakhanovites by verbally and even physically abusing them. Foremen and engineers, only too well aware that record mania and the provision of special conditions for Stakhanovites created disruptions in production and bottlenecks in supplies, also on occasion sabotaged the movement. At least that was the accusation made against many who often served as scapegoats for the failure of the Stakhanovite movement to fulfill its promise of unleashing the productive forces of the country. Nevertheless, the Stakhanovite movement continued into the war and even enjoyed something of a revival in the postwar years, when it was exported to Eastern Europe. See also: INDUSTRIALIZATION, SOVIET; KULTURNOST; SOVIET MAN
Siegelbaum, Lewis H. (1988). Stakhanovism and the Politics of Productivity in the USSR, 1935-1941. New York: Cambridge University Press. Thurston, Robert. (1993). “The Stakhanovite Movement: The Background to the Great Terror in the Factories, 1935-1938.” In Stalinist Terror: New Perspectives, eds. J. Arch Getty and Roberta T. Manning. New York: Cambridge University Press.
LEWIS H. SIEGELBAUM STALIN CONSTITUTION See CONSTITUTION OF
